I had a number of things to write about this morning, so I evaluated each and placed a value on each topic as to its importance. I then used those values to establish a priority. Obviously, “Juggling Priorities” won out.
What do I mean with the phrase “Juggling Priorities”? All of us have an unlimited number of things going on in our lives at any one time. There’s faith, health, relationships, politics, work, world instability, weather and a host of others. I often visualize this as juggling. We have all these balls we need to keep in the air all at the same time.
I learned to juggle balls when I was in my teens. I saw someone on television do it and thought it was pretty neat. The internet didn’t exist at the time, so I couldn’t just jump onto YouTube to watch a video on how to juggle. Instead, I observed someone juggling, followed the pattern in my head and then kept practicing until one day I could do it. It’s really not that difficult; it just looks difficult.
The key to juggling is to forget about what your hands are doing and focus on the pattern you’ve established. If you’ve established a good pattern, you know where each ball is going to be at any given time. For example, the height of your throw of each ball should be at eye level and the angle of each throw should be so the ball lands in your hand that is waiting to receive it. When catching the ball, you don’t reach for it; you simply wait for it to fall into your hand. To catch an inaccurate throw, you move your body instead of moving your hand.
When we juggle priorities, we rely on a pattern. A pattern provides consistency and just like juggling balls, if we remain consistent, we can keep all the balls in the air at the same time, and for a longer period of time. We establish our pattern based upon Urgency, Importance, Other Priorities, and Other Things we need to do. No matter how many items we need to juggle at any given time, our success will depend on placing them properly into our pattern.
Urgent Priorities are those priorities that need our immediate attention and must take precedence. An example of an urgent priority may be a smoke detector going off or the phone ringing during the middle of the night. We usually don’t receive phone calls at that time of night, so when it happens, we assume it’s an emergency that requires our immediate attention. We will jump out of bed and race to the phone to answer it. If the call turns out not to be an emergency, we’re pretty put out because we gave up our current priority: sleep, in order to answer it. As for smoke detectors going off in the middle of the night, I think there’s a secret conspiracy among sadistic smoke detector manufacturers to drain the batteries only in the middle of the night.
No one thing should consistently pop up as an Urgent Priority. If it does, then you need to work on getting rid of it once and for all, or move it to a lower priority level. Urgent Priorities should be reserved for those infrequent and unexpected things that pop up demanding our immediate attention or deadlines that are nearing.
Important Priorities are things we must keep in the air. They may include our faith, family, finances, obligations, and a host of others. Letting one of these priorities fall could be damaging or even disastrous. For example, for those of us with Myasthenia Gravis, taking our medications at the proper time is extremely important. Failure to do so could result in worsening symptoms, relapses, or more. For this reason, we assign taking our medications as an Important Priority.
Then we have Other Priorities. Other priorities include things that are not urgent, not overly important, but things we still need to do. For example, we need to go to the grocery store and buy groceries. Unless it’s something we need right now, we may be able to push this off for a period of time, but we can’t forget about it or it moves up in priority. If there’s nothing on my grocery list that is critical or not immediately needed, I may decide to push back my planned trip to the store in order to deal with an issue of higher priority. On the other hand, if I need to feed my family in an hour and I’m missing a key ingredient, I may have just pushed my trip to the store into an Important Priority or even an Urgent Priority.
Finally, we have all the Other Things in our lives with which we need to deal. They aren’t priorities, but still require our attention. Other Things, however, can quickly become a priority at any time and may include things outside our control. An example might be the weather. We can’t control or change the weather; we just work around it. Weather can change in priority status at any time. If a tornado warning is issued, weather suddenly becomes an Urgent Priority and we drop everything else to head to shelter. If it’s going to rain, that may change our plans for a picnic, so we may have to make accommodations by either postponing our picnic or moving it inside.
Unconsciously, we establish priority patterns for everything we need to juggle. Items are constantly moving back and forth, in and out of categories within our pattern as they gain or reduce in importance and urgency. We may even toss a few items out of our juggling pattern altogether to better allow us to handle all the items currently in our pattern or to make room for a new item that just appeared.
When thinking about juggling priorities, I can’t help thinking about my daughter. When my granddaughter was newly born, my grandson was 3 years old. My daughter had her hands full. Her husband helped out a great deal, but she still had a lot of priorities to juggle. She had the newborn who would wake up every few hours demanding to be fed or changed. She had a 3 year old that still needed a great deal of attention. She had a dog that was pretty self-sufficient, but still required being fed and let outside. She had meals to prepare. She had laundry to do. She had a house to keep clean because guests were always dropping by to see the new baby. How did she do it all? She prioritized.
The baby received top priority because she couldn’t fend for herself. She depended on Mom for everything. The 3 year old son came next. He still required meals, baths, bedtime stories, and plenty of attention. To some extent, he was somewhat self-sufficient, but when 3 year olds fend for themselves, you can almost count on trouble. Again, her husband helped out a great deal, but he also needed to maintain his job in order to provide for his family.
So, in order, baby, 3 year old son, husband, dog, house. You notice “self” wasn’t listed. It probably should have been, but she really didn’t have time for herself, so “self” didn’t receive as much priority as it should have. Sleep, for example, switched from 6-8 hours a night to whenever she could slip in 20 minutes or so. Such are the joys of parenthood. The important part is that she did it; she made it through. She juggled all those priorities and made it happen.
With Myasthenia Gravis, we definitely need to be able to juggle priorities. Unlike my daughter during parenthood, we can’t allow “self” to be ignored. Our health has to be considered an Important Priority and sometimes even an Urgent Priority. We sometimes have to reduce in priority some of the things we once thought were “nice to do” and instead focus on the things we “must do”. A “must do” is taking our medication. We can’t push off a dose until when we happen to get around to it. Much of our medication is time sensitive and delaying or skipping a dose can cause major problems. We need to make “rest” an Important Priority or we may find ourselves in serious trouble. We need to learn how to say “No” to an invite if we’re not up to attending. We need to make time for exercise and staying active so our muscles don’t atrophy and weaken. We need to ask for help when we truly need it instead of allowing our egos to get in the way. Most importantly, we need to recognize when are bodies are telling us that something is urgent and seek immediate help.
A person with MG must become an excellent priority juggler. We have a lot of balls in the air. I find it amazing some of the things I used to consider important only to find that now I have different priorities. I hope you set priorities for yourself and are able to keep them juggled. Just like when I first learned to juggle balls, when a ball falls, you just pick it up and start juggling again. Sooner or later, you’ll get the hang of it.